Based on John 1: 43-51

When I was a young girl, I occasionally liked to take a “mental health day” from school. Now, mind you, I loved going to school—school was like my second home. But every once in a while, once or twice a year, I relished just staying in bed, maybe eating crackers and soup, reading a book, resting from the wearying labors of being a kid. Occasionally my mom would even bring the small portable black and white television in to my room and adjust the rabbit ears so that I could watch a program or two while I rested.

But in order to finagle a mental health day, I had to either be sick enough to convince my mother that I needed to stay home, or I had to exaggerate a slightly scratchy throat, the sniffles, or a stomach ache. The stomachache was my personal favorite, because really, if one thinks about having a stomachache hard enough, one can generally generate enough sour feeling to bring one on. And in terms of convincing my mother, all I thought I had to do was spend a little too much time in the bathroom, and, naturally that kind of thing was a concern for her. Because mothers in general are usually pretty on top of that kind of thing.

But my mother was no slouch in the mothering department. My mother had a secret weapon, an arsenal in the fight against dishonesty in eight-year-olds. When I would be lying there in my bed, telling my mother the half-truth of, “Mommy, I don’t think I can make it through the school day today. I feel sick. No, I don’t have any tests. I think I need to stay home.” She would be listening carefully, gauging my honesty, feeling my forehead, and looking for signs of illness. And if persisted in my story, but my symptoms were iffy at best, she would give me that look of concern, rub my forehead gently as only a mother can, look me in the eyes, and pull out her secret weapon. “Well, Julie, you know, and Jesus knows, if you are lying or if you are telling the truth.” She would give me one last meaningful look before she would turn around and leave the room. And I always knew I was busted.

“He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!” It doesn’t just apply to Santa Claus, does it? The subtle reminders of an all-knowing, all-seeing God are a double-edged sword, aren’t they? Most of us surely would like an on-call God at our disposal, kind of like having a heavenly “On-Star” agent to pull us out of a jam. But we’re not always too keen on the omniscience of God when we would just as soon be able to get away with a few things.

The author of the Gospel of John was concerned with spreading the message that Jesus is both fully human and fully God—that Christ is in fact the earthly incarnation of God. This brief encounter with Nathaniel serves to reinforce that point. When we get the story of this brief encounter, Jesus is still at the very beginning of his ministry. So far, the only person in John’s gospel proclaiming anything even remotely divine about Jesus is John the Baptist. Everyone else, it seems, is trying to figure out who this Jesus is. So in the midst of his travels through Galilee, on his mission to call disciples to help him in his work, Jesus finds Philip, and asks him to join Jesus in his ministry. Philip, after saying Yes to Jesus finds his friend Nathaniel to tell him the news, “We have found the one whom Moses and the prophets told us about—Jesus of Nazareth.”

Nathaniel is skeptical. Well, of course he is. The Jews have been looking for the one about whom the prophets foretold for a couple thousand years. This is likely not the first person to have claimed to be the Messiah. And to top it off, he’s from the backwater, nowhere, hicktown of Nazareth. We’d be skeptical too. But Nathaniel decides to go along to see what all the fuss is about.

When Nathaniel encounters Jesus, he is told right away by Jesus that Nathaniel is known and recognized by him. Nathaniel comes back with the only logical question that you or I would, “How did you know who I am?” “Well, I saw you over there, sitting under the fig tree, and since everyone knows that under the fig tree is the place where Jews go to study the Scriptures in the heat of the day, I knew who you were.”

This is the point where the story gets a little strange. Suddenly Nathaniel thinks that he has put two and two together and has figured out exactly who Jesus is. He proclaims him the Son of God. There’s only one problem with that—Nathaniel is basing this discovery on Jesus’ powers of observation. For recognizing him from seeing him earlier under the tree, Nathaniel s convinced that Jesus is the Messiah he has been looking for. And Jesus’ answer to Nathaniel is the moment that this whole story hinges upon.

“You believe me to be God because I saw you sitting under a fig tree and remembered you? You haven’t seen anything yet!”

It’s so easy, so tempting to reduce God to someone who can do clever parlor tricks, isn’t it? Nathaniel clearly was impressed that Jesus knew something about him by seeing where he was. What Nathaniel didn't know, couldn't grasp, is that Jesus didn't just know something about Nathaniel, he knew Nathaniel. Jesus—the one who knew Nathaniel’s unformed substance, who knows Nathaniel’s sitting down and rising up—that Jesus is God. The kind of God whose omniscience is enough to spook an eight-year-old into getting up, getting dressed, and going to school.

That same God is the One of whom the Psalmist said,
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

We struggle with that feeling of nowhere to hide from God; The Psalmist acknowledges it:
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

There’s a pithy description of God I learned in Seminary: “God will never let us go, never let us down, and never let us off.” Let that sink in for a second. Most of us really are counting on God never letting is down. That’s the kind of “On-Star”, on-call God we really like to have in our corner. It reassures us to come to church and hear that God is there for us to answer our prayers and guide us through the dark valleys of our lives.

And the part about God never letting us go? Well, that can comfort us, too, to know that like the prodigal, there is no distance from God that we can wander, no distance too great, that God will not run to greet us when we decide to come back. That kind of permanence can sometimes mean the difference between having faith and losing faith altogether. I like to think of that kind of God when young people seem to leave the church for greener pastures; because I know, deep in my heart, that there is a place waiting for them and a God who loves them when their wandering is over and it’s time to come back to living in a daily relationship with God.

Rarely do we like to think about that last part: the God who will never let us off. But the God we serve, the God who loves us, cannot be reduced to a god who performs clever parlor tricks. That third level of commitment that Jesus seems to be trying to warn Nathaniel about is very real. In coming to earth, and becoming Immanuel, God-with-us, Christ is refusing to be some pretty trophy God we can take down off the shelf when we need a little help or feel a little lonely. In Christ, God seeks an intimacy with us; God wants both to know us and be known by us.

The kind of relationships that don’t seem to last very long are the kind that come with little or no mutual expectation, little or no mutual trust, and little or no accountability. To Nathaniel, Jesus is saying “I come not to know something about you, but to enter into a covenant with you.” Through the voice of the Psalmist, God is saying to us, “I am so intimately connected to you as to have been there when your very being was formed; even before that, I knew you.”

The other evening at Personnel meeting the discussion of building pastoral relationships over time came up. I—being a fan of the work of the Alban Institute—brought up the statistic that the third year in ministry together seems to be critical in terms of determining the longevity of the pastoral relationship. The reason is that by the third year, the scales seem to have fallen from everyone’s eyes—including the pastor’s, and the watershed work of the mission of the church can now start. Both pastor and congregation have built an ease and intimacy with one another—if the hard work of the first two years, of building trust, mutual expectation, and mutual accountability has been attended to.

But God does not want to wait two or three years to establish an intimate relationship with us. There is a sense of urgency in having a God from whom we cannot hide. That urgency exists within us to prod us on, to open us up to the possibilities that trusting God and knowing God and being known by God and acknowledging these things hold for us: freedom, and peace, and confidence of those who love God and are actively in relationship with God. An end to the attempts to run and hide from God.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Thanks be to God!